Zeke has settled in. The sun is streaming through the window onto his bed. I need but lay him down in a comfortable spot and he goes to sleep within seconds.
I go into the garage, hoping the fire door will muffle any sounds.
Weeping has always bothered Zeke, upset his digestion, made him lick his lips in anxiety. Deep full-throated sobs make him tremble. Back in September when we first started our glissade down this slope, Becky pulled me out of a day-long fit by asking me to keep up a brave front for Zeke. It worked. It worked well. Even from the car he could summon up my ancestral Brit reserve from the id’s vasty deep, keep me stock-straight and silent as the veterinary assistants prepared his prescription. Nothing more than a silent tear leaked out as I handed over the credit card. They would all have forgiven me, and I am far from shy about such things, but Zeke’s comfort is more important than mine this week. And there was the drive home to consider.
“There comes a point where we have to start to advocate for the pet,” he said. “It can be hard to see what needs to be done when you’re so close.”
“I have all day,” I thought, standing at that counter for a million years. “I have the day alone and then the conversation with Becky. This can wait.”
The shed is out back, unfinished. It was three years ago we started working on it, putting in new windows and door, taking out an inner wall. I would wire it, I said, and put in walls and shelves, and quit my job and write, and Zeke could spend all day sleeping at my feet, wandering out into the garden to stretch. He has a peaceable kingdom in the garden. He stands there and the sparrows forage between his feet, and then he’d let me know the rain had started by rubbing sodden fur against my knees. And 2004 passed, and 2005, and the spider webs grew thick over the new windows. I’ve started work anew, but my schedule is eaten up with watching him. I will not finish in time.
A team of carpenters would not finish in time.
“You can be there to pick him up,” he said, “but one fall or another will break a bone.” I stifled a defensive protest. “He’s obviously been soiling himself for a while, and the weight loss? Three pounds in the last month. Yes, he ate a whole chicken yesterday, but he is starving. This is catabolic wasting.”
The phrase is quality of life, a damned vague standard. He takes a bit of pork loin from my fingers and his eyes flare. He makes the top of the hill and looks at me, a triumphant lupine grin spread across his face. He will keep on until he breaks, for me. He leans his shoulder against my shin as we stand together, rests his cheek on my shoulder as I carry him up the stairs. He will pace all night unless I sleep next to him in the living room. I did nothing to deserve such love, but I have it and must live up to it, up to that final act that reeks so badly of betrayal. My mind knows differently. My heart thinks my mind is a euthanizing Nazi.
“I think this week is the week you should consider,” he said.
Four lanes of high-speed traffic weave through the hills south of Martinez, past Muir’s old house and into Franklin Canyon. I drove five miles below the limit, then twenty above, then caught myself and slowed again. The new year takes hold in those hills this week, growth licking across the slopes a bright green flame. The mustard is blooming already in places, where the hills face south and the land is cupped to hold a bit of water. He used to run through fields of mustard taller than him, burst out back onto the trail eyes ablaze. Our first hike on Ring Mountain 15 years ago, some men drumming in an oak grove spooked him and he ran crazily away from me back down the hill. We did not know each other then and I imagined him lost, the first time of hundreds in a decade and a half, and yet he heard me call from a quarter mile away and ran back to me. He always came when I asked him to, and behind a street sweeper doing 50 in the right lane I could hold out no longer. He was asleep in the back seat of Becky’s car and my mouth gaped open in a silent wail, tears blurring the truck in front of me and I slowed to 45. How many years have I fretted about this, wasted valuable time that could have been spent walking with him? Always he was there, waiting for me to come back to the present. And I will never hike those hills with him again, never see that green flame with him again, the Earth and I will betray him by continuing to live without him, and I rolled down off the freeway and turned toward our house.
He struggled up from the back, stuck his head between the front seats grinning, touched his forehead to my arm.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Zeke
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